Today I bring you a guest post from Gavin Nachbar. Gavin is a freelance writer who cannot be found anywhere in the world without his iPhone. As a writer, he has written for a couple of magazines including Hyphen Magazine and The Escapist Magazine.

Gavin doesn’t have a site of his own right now, but says you can feel free to email him with any questions about the iPhone!

Back in 2007, Apple.’s iPhone was released to a crowd of cheering fans who couldn’t wait to have their phone and iPod together in one. They were excited to be able to get their email and go online in places where WiFi had previously said “no”. In two short years, though, the iPhone has turned into so much more.

The iPhone has not gone without criticism, though, and many people will swear by their Blackberries. Throughout the election, we heard about Barack Obama’s obsession with his Blackberry, and many of us couldn’t help but think “Maybe I should get one of those?” Both iPhones and Blackberries are great in their own right, and either would be a great choice for a writer.

Then what sets these two phones apart? The iPhone has over 25,000 third party applications ready for download, and that number is only growing. Different applications serve different purposes, and they do all kinds of things. Some of them can identify a song on the radio while others can give you directions back to where you parked your car. Of all of these applications, here are 6 of the best for writers to use.

[Note from Dustin: For more info or to download these apps, please visit the iPhone apps store either on your phone or in iTunes.]

1. Text Editor

One of the major knocks on the iPhone, since day one, has been that it is much harder to type on than other phones, particularly the Blackberry. Anybody with fingers larger than a 12-year old’s will run into problems typing on the small touchscreen keys. The way that the iPhone makes up for the difficultly typing is by having a great spelling corrector. Text Editor is one of the many applications that works to fix the “small keys” problem. With Text Editor, each key is two times as large as the typical iPhone’s keys making it much easier for us as writers to type longer notes, essays, or even books. Cost: $0.99

2. Voice Notes

You know that time you were sitting at work or cooking dinner and you have a “light bulb above the head” moment, but when you’re sitting at your computer later that night you can’t for the life of you remember what that idea was? Enter Voice Notes. All it takes it two taps and you can talk as if you are making a phone call. Just hit the play button when you have a brain cramp later, and you’re good to go. Price: Free

3.Photonote

Just like when you have an idea in your head, most writers know that feeling of seeing the inspiration for an article. Photonote uses the iPhone’s 2 Megapixel camera and combines it with a program similar to Text Editor. This application allows you to snap a picture easily, and then write a caption to remind you of why it is you took that picture in the first place.

4. Dictionary with Spell Check

This app has made the impossible…possible! You can now bring that 5 lb. dictionary on the road with you without being weighed down by a giant book. Easy look up makes it possible for writers to just search a word, or one close, and this app gives you the definition and even more important, the correct spelling! Price: $2.99 (Larger dictionaries can be bought for as much as $29.99)

5. Worklog

This app was made for freelancers. Period. As freelancers, we’re always looking for ways to track how long we’ve worked on a certain project, to know how much to charge, etc. Enter Worklog. With an extremely simple interface, Worklog was made with the freelancer in mind. With that said, it is not perfect. One of te major knocks on the app is that is it not designed to track your work for more than a handful of projects. If you are working on a dozen articles at a given time, the app will have some trouble tracking your work on each individual project. Price: Worklog Lite: Free, Worklog Full: $7.99

6. Pandora Radio

There is only one thing better than music, and that is…free music! We listen to music as we write, we listen to it in the car, and everywhere else we can! With the iPhone making it possible to listen to music in more and more places, Pandora Radio is an application that streams free Internet radio stations directly into your phone. One can choose their songs, sorting by genre, or by searching for a favorite artist or song. With that, the application will sort through it’s database and find the song you are looking for, as well as ones similar to it. Price: Free

All in all, for many writers the iPhone is a dream. Personally, after buying mine half a year a go, I can’t imagine what life was like before it. With that said, the number of WiFi hot spots around the county are increasing every day, and as a writer you often don’t even need the internet, just a computer. The iPhone does not, and will not, replace your home computer or laptop, but it will while you’re on the road.

I’m a longtime Palm user. I got my first one back in 2000 when I was working for a dot-com startup (that went dot-boom later on) while going to graduate school, full-time. I desperately needed to get my schedule in order.

But I soon found that the Palm was really well-adapted to writing on the go. The handwriting-based text entry was useful for writing on the New York subways — I could write a whole 3–4 page essay on the way to work with one elbow wrapped around a pole or hung through a handstrap. And for longer sessions where I could sit down, a couple of companies made nifty foldable keyboards you could attach to the Palm.

Although Palm’s heyday seems to have come and gone, a Palm is still a useful little writing device. There are excellent word processors available, such as Documents to Go, which allows you to write fully-formatted documents, save in Word format, and swap files back and forth with any version of Office. The PDA-only devices (like the Palm TX) still have handwriting support (Treo users like me have to use third-party software like MobileWrite). And there are both infrared keyboards like the Palm Universal Wireless Keyboard and Bluetooth keyboards like the iGo Stowaway that allow you to have a full keyboard to work on wherever you can find a flat surface to write on.

Palm’s can be easily extended with all sorts of third-party software that you might find useful as a writer, from bibliographic reference managers to full relational databases to outliners to memopads. Most of them can also access the Internet, via either a built-in cellphone, an external cellphone connected via infrared or Bluetooth, or built-in Wi-Fi, which means you have access to online resources like Wikipedia, too.

I wouldn’t recommend using a Palm for writing that Tolkein-esque fantasy trilogy you’re working on, but for short pieces (or parts of longer works) it’s pretty handy — easy to carry, easy to use, and with a better battery than most laptops. Jeff Kirvin used to maintain a site for Palm-based writing; the site’s been gone for years now, but the Writing on Your Palm archives are still up if you want some useful tips. There’s also a fairly active Writing on Your Palm Google group committed to mobile writing (including writing on Windows mobile and Apple devices). Check them out if you’re interested in using a Palm to extend your writing life.